This course opens with an exploration of the social context and aims of literacy teaching and learning. It goes on to describe a range of historical and contemporary approaches to literacy pedagogy, including didactic, authentic, functional, and critical approaches. The course takes has a 'Multiliteracies' perspective, which aims to expand the definition of literacy to encompass today's multimodal communications, and the diversity of literacies across different social and culltural contexts. A Multiliteracies approach also suggests a broad range of activity types—experiential, conceptual, analytical and critical.
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Recommended Background
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This course is designed for people interested in literacy teaching and learning, including people who may wish to join education as a profession, practicing teachers interested in exploring future directions for a vocation that is currently undergoing transformation, and community and workplace leaders who regard their mission to be in part "educative."
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Take this Course for Credit at the University of Illinois.
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This course has the same content and anticipates the same level of contribution by students in the 'New Media and Literacies' course offered to graduate certificate, masters and doctoral level students in the College of Education at the University of Illinois.
Of course, in the nature of MOOCs many people will just want to view the videos and casually join some of the discussions. Some people say that these limited kinds of participation offer evidence that MOOCs suffer from low retention rates. Far from it - we say that any level of engagement is good engagement.
On the other hand, if you would like to take this course for credit at the University of Illinois, apply here: http://education.illinois.edu/online-offcampus/programs-degrees/ldl-online If you have already taken this course in Coursera, you can prepare a portfolio of work created there and request that this work is taken into account for your University of Illinois course.

From the lesson

Didactic + Authentic Approaches to Literacy

This module begins with an overview of the range of activity types that might be found in literacies pedagogy. These are illustrated with some examples of literacies learning modules. It goes on to examine two major models of literacy pedagogy: didactic and authentic.